Failure of XP boot, consistantly hitting walls with go arounds

(Note, everything in this has been from googling my errors over the last five days, myself, I know relatively nothing in this subject )
The background - I attempted to upgrade my Nvidia graphic card drivers following correct procedure, hit "ok" to about 20 screens with some tech jargon about "scripting" in them durning the uninstall of the drivers, after the uninstall completed, my net connection was dead as well, so no installing the new drivers. With nothing left to do (i'm new with this), I shutdown. Now, I get a blank screen after the windows XP loading screen (even in safe mode).
(Advanced warnings)
-it used to be a emachines, so no XP disk, I changed motherboards, so no recovery disk use.
- I have a burned XP pro disk, but I cannot boot from CD, no matter how I work it in BIOS. It simply gives me
"Booting from CD
"Booting from CD"
then throws me back into normal boot, and the blank screen.

What I DO have is a windows ME startup floppy, which gets me into DOS, where I can access that good old XP pro disk, but I can't get far in setup (D:\i386\winnt.exe), as it says windows needs some 380 MB of space for the temp files, and it cannot find a drive with that much space. I know I had 13% free space on my HD last time i looked. Nothing is backed up (learned a lesson here), so I don't want to format if possible, but If there is a way to delete from DOS, i'd gladly sacifice some programs such as EQ2 which can be reinstalled, to make the space.
(I noticed that in the very first paragraph when I start up, after the BIOS and graphic card info, it says I have "128mb RAM", but maybe its speaking of the card's ram, not my comp's?)

I have cleared cmos, moved the ram around, switched out the video card for another, removed extra PCI cards, switched monitors.
-Starting in safe mode normal freezes at \windows\system32\drivers\mup.sys.
-Starting in safe mode w/networking and command prompt does the same.
-Enable Boot logging gave <windows root>\system32\ntoskrnl.exe as missing or corrupt. I copied two other files in a repair operation for it, but "copy d:\i386\driver.cab c:\system32\ntoskrnl.exe /v" only returned Bad command or file name, so I was unable to finish. Oddly enough, I no longer get the error since then, it just goes through to the blank screen.
-Enable VGA -boot- blank screen
-LKGC -boot- blank screen
-Directory Services Restore Mode - message rebooting in safe mode- drivers list, checks system, "Volume is clean. Windows has finished checking the disk". No more activity after this, does not respond to keyboard commands.
-Debugging Mode - boot- blank screen
CMOS Settings
Halt on all, but keyboard/halt on no errors -> loads to blank screen
BIOS
Boot order - Floppy/HD/CD - to blank
CD/HD/floppy - Boot foom CD : Boot from CD : - to blank
Floppy/cd/HD, CD/CD/CD, CD/none/none, all same as above.

Well.. that about sums up everything I know.. In short.. How can you reinstall/repair Windows XP home without a restore disk, and without (normal) access to your CD rom? and/or How can I safely delete some stuff in DOS to make the required 380 mbs room the XP pro disk wants to do its thing?